About Our Company
| Our History | Our Products | Our Location |
Our History
North Market Street Graphics had its origins in a small typesetting business that publishing industry veterans Dick Stipe and Liz Andes started in their Lancaster, Pennsylvania, row home in 1983. The company, called Archetype, employed a small staff of keyboarders to type manuscripts, which in those days were stored on floppy disks. Archetype’s customers used the documents produced to compose pages for publications that ran the gamut from complex chemistry journals to bodice-ripping romance novels.
As the keystroke business found its market, a larger staff became necessary, and eventually so did larger quarters. Archetype and its growing staff moved to their permanent home in an old tobacco warehouse at 317 North Market Street, in the heart of the historic downtown Lancaster business district. The business expanded to incorporate the next logical steps in the book production process: page composition and art production. By 1988, the composition and art work had become the primary focus and was spun off into a separate company named for its location: North Market Street Graphics (NMSG). The two companies—Archetype providing the keystrokes and document preparation and NMSG offering full prepress services—continue to operate in tandem to the present day, keeping pace with the enormous changes the publishing industry has experienced since their advent.
Our Products
NMSG has done production work for more than 25,000 titles during the course of its history. We are proud of the depth of our bibliography, as well as its breadth. Books produced by us have won numerous awards and include hundreds of titles that have appeared on various best-seller lists over the years.
Some of the high-profile projects we have had a hand in include our two-day start-to-finish turnaround of the Clinton health plan book back in the mid-1990s, on which our staff worked round the clock to meet the seemingly impossible deadline. (We met it.) We also produced Bill Clinton’s autobiography, My Life, in 2004, and, to balance the political scales, we produced George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, in 2010. For historical perspective, we composed Edmund Morris’s acclaimed biography of Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, as well as recent well-regarded biographies of Ulysses S. Grant, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon. In addition, we have produced several of historian Jon Meacham’s books, including his biographies of Andrew Jackson and George H.W. Bush, as well as The Soul of America, his 2018 examination of divisive political periods in U.S. history and how we, as Americans, rise above them.
We have worked on all the various editions and formats of Stieg Larsson’s Girl series: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, as well as the sequels. We have also produced many of Debbie Macomber’s popular novels, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code series, George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons from his series A Song of Ice and Fire, and the Star Wars series of novels. In a more scholarly vein, we’ve produced several of the companion books for Ken Burns’s acclaimed PBS series, including Baseball, The National Parks, and The Vietnam War.
We experience constant brushes with fame, producing biographies of numerous artists, celebrities, and other prominent people. In the ’90s, we composed Katharine Hepburn’s best-selling autobiography, Me, shortly before her death. More recently, we produced James Curtis’s thousand-page biography of Spencer Tracy. We’ve done popular biographies of Paul Newman and Robert Redford, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, Edward Hopper and Henri Matisse, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters, and Hunter S. Thompson and Pope John Paul II. We have produced biographies of rock stars from Duane Allman to Jay-Z, including books on or by Elton John, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Patti Smith, Art Garfunkel, Judy Collins, Graham Nash, and Otis Redding.
Our reputation for excellence in cookbook production is widely acknowledged. Our “batterie de cuisine” includes many of Martha Stewart’s cooking and entertaining books, as well as books by well-known chefs and food celebrities such as Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, Lidia Bastianich, Mario Batali, Giada de Laurentiis, The Neelys, David Venable, Nancy Silverton, Rachael Ray, and the Barefoot Contessa (Ina Garten). Having composed Mark Bittman’s popular cookbook How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, we then stepped boldly into the future by converting it to eBook format.
Clearly, we can handle anything from professional and technical books full of complicated tables, detailed charts and illustrations, and multilevel equations to fine-art books with high-quality color reproductions. And we will do it in a cost-effective and deadline-conscious fashion, with always-available customer service access so you can monitor the progress of your project.
Our Location
Historic downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has proved to be an ideal location for a small family business like NMSG. At the other end of North Market Street is Central Market, the oldest continuously operating farmer’s market in the country and a favorite destination for locals and tourists alike. A couple of blocks away is Gallery Row, consisting of several blocks of row homes converted into showcases for the work of local artists. The repurposed tobacco warehouse that houses NMSG is situated directly behind the 300 Block of North Queen Street, home of the funkiest and most creative shops in the city, including contemporary, retro, and antique clothing and furniture shops, a glassworks, and a skateboard shop. Our location has been a good fit for the creative types who are employed at NMSG and is one of the perks of working here.
The many restaurants in downtown Lancaster have something for everybody, from casual bar food to fine dining and a wide variety of ethnic choices. We NMSG staffers appreciate the many options we have for lunch! Lancaster is a matrix for a diversity of cultures, including the Amish, a vibrant Hispanic population, several nearby colleges and an art school that contribute a youthful perspective, and the descendants of the salt-of-the-earth original German and English settlers, whose rock-solid work ethic is reflected in NMSG’s own philosophy.
